


they headed down south and they're still running today

by genesis_frog



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: (brief) - Freeform, (the animal death isn't frumpkin it's a mouse), Animal Death, Backstory, First Meetings, Gen, Nott-Typical Threats of Violence, played out caleb and nott jail fic: the movie
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-05
Updated: 2019-09-05
Packaged: 2020-11-01 22:20:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,330
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20526137
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/genesis_frog/pseuds/genesis_frog
Summary: She is arrested. She has a roommate, who is not, in fact, a sack of potatoes.





	they headed down south and they're still running today

**Author's Note:**

> i intended this to be a longer fic focusing on caleb and nott building trust during their months on the run together, because that's really interesting to me, but i only wrote 2000 words and then i stopped. but i like what i did write, a lot, and i think it has a good stopping place so it feels whole but i could add to it if i ever wanted to.
> 
> heads up that this contains light/vague spoilers for nott's backstory from episodes 48/49.
> 
> title is from "take the money and run" by steve miller band, which is, spiritually, a caleb and nott song imo

She is angry, and she is _ loud. _

She was quiet when they brought her in, kept her eyes cast downward as they marched her through damp stonework hallways. She was quiet when the iron door was opened and they shoved her into the small, dark, stone room she was probably going to die in.

But the instant the door shuts, she _ rages. _

“Let me out! Let me out of here, I’ll kill all of you! I didn’t do nothing wrong!” she screams, hands holding onto the bars, all of her energy being put into being as loud as possible (that must be why she is shaking).

She breathes in; no response.

“Hey! Fuckers! Come back here, let me at you again! I’ll tear your throats out!”

She listens again; there is no voice from outside the cel-- “Could you be a little quieter?”

She howls in fear.

And she freezes.

And she slowly turns around.

_ Oh _. She has a cellmate, maybe? It’s hard to tell. It almost looks like there is a sack of potatoes in one corner, but that would be ridiculous. Who keeps potatoes in a jail cell? No self-respecting jailer, is who. She squints; it’s definitely a cellmate. She can pick out hair, probably brown or auburn, and light skin, and what she thought was a sack seems to be a coat, actually, filled with holes and patches (the workmanship is poor).

“Hello,” she says, flashing a wide grin at the individual, one that she knows would show off her very pointy, very goblin teeth. Normally, she doesn’t like to smile, hers is ugly and scary and doesn’t look cute or nice at all, which is what a smile should be. But she’s in jail! She has to make a good first impression, to be the scariest and toughest inmate! That’s how these things go, right?

“Hello,” the individual says back. “You are giving me a headache.”

“Sorry,” she lies. She is not sorry at all. First impressions, after all. “What’re you, uh, _ in for? _” She slides over to one of the walls adjacent to the door and crouches with her back pressed against it, mirroring her cellmate.

Her cellmate, on their part, peeks up at her. They have blue eyes. She’s surprised she can tell in the dark.

“Why do you ask?” they inquire, carefully not overtly _ defensive _, but clearly guarded. They have a strange accent that she’s not familiar with.

“Just trying to make small talk, I guess, make a good first impression on my new roomie,” she tries. Said roomie narrows their eyes a bit at her, as if they’re trying to read her like a book. Silly roomie, people aren’t words. They take a moment to think, and she begins to find herself squirming a little anxiously.

“You first,” Roomie decides finally. She feels the tension drain from her bones.

“Theft, even though that woman dropped her purse on the ground, so it was _ fair game _ and _ definitely _not stealing. Also, I guess, for being a goblin.”

Roomie leans a little forward at this, and then they say a word she doesn’t understand, and a single ball of light _ foomfs _ into the air, floating above their heads. She startles, yelps, and presses her whole body against the wall, eyes fixed first to the glowing ball, and then to her roomie, when the afterimages start to set in. She sees, now -- her roomie is masculine in appearance, dirty and shaggy, with long, tangled ginger hair and a straight nose and the ghost of freckles.

“So you are,” he says. “Huh. Interesting.”

“You couldn’t tell when I was thrown in here, or yelling, or introducing myself, or…?”

“Humans cannot see in the dark like most other races,” he says. “Without this --” he gestures to his ball of light “--I’m basically blind in here.”

“Oh” is all she can muster. And then: “And you’re not, _ scared _, or angry or anything?”

He shakes his head. “I have seen worse than one little goblin in a jail cell with a pathetic hobo.” And she can’t help herself: she laughs. Just once, but it’s a laugh nonetheless. She takes a breath.

“Hey roomie,” she begins. She takes a moment, thinks, as if she is gearing up for something long, but then she changes her mind and says, instead. “What’s your name?”

And her roomie looks a little surprised. The gears turn, briefly, in his head; she can practically see them, cranking her question along to where it needs to go to be understood.

“Call me Caleb Widogast,” he says. “And you are?”

She, too, pauses, and thinks. A dozen names are at the tip of her tongue -- a first name, a maiden name, a name taken in marriage, a few names thrown at her like spears and a few names given to her out of affection. But Roomie didn’t ask about her name.

“I’m Nott. Nott the Brave,” she answers. Caleb Widogast nods.

“It is good to meet you, Nott the Brave,” he says formally.

They don’t shake hands, but maybe the way they finally lock eyes from either side of the cell is enough.

* * *

After two days, Nott is tearing her hair out. Not literally, but spiritually.

She hangs over her meager meal, fingers not quite behaving. She feels it, the Itch. For new trinkets, for booze. But there is nothing to do for it here, and she suffers.

“I can’t take this anymore,” she declares. “Caleb, we’re busting the fuck out of this joint.”

He looks up from his corner; his eye bags have eye bags. “What?”

She sidles over to him. “I’m good at lockpicking,” she hisses. “And you have magic, right? The poofy glowy thing?”

“_ Ja _, but… escaping?” He looks a little alarmed.

“Naturally.”

She puts on what she hopes is an inspiring look of determination. He undergoes a face journey, moving from “this is nuts” to “well, I am nuts” to “I have nothing to lose”.

“_ Ja _, okay, I’m in,” he acquiesces. She does a little fist pump.

“If you can get me something - a wire, a lockpick, a key - I could break us out of here,” she tells him. “I don’t know if you have anything like that, but -”

“I have a cat,” he says. He snaps his fingers and there is a cat on his lap.

“You have a cat,” she echoes.

“This is Frumpkin,” he tells her.

“Frumpkin,” she echoes.

“Frumpkin will retrieve what you need,” he tells her. “I can see through his eyes and tell him to get what you are asking for.”

She nods. There is a cat sitting in Caleb Widogast’s lap. Its fur is golden brown and covered in a weird spotted pattern, and it has these blue eyes that seem to glow. There is a cat in Caleb Widogast’s lap, in prison.

He pets the cat once, twice, and snaps his fingers again and the cat _ bamfs _ away.

“I can work with this,” she decides.

* * *

That night, they exact the plan.

She waits patiently, watching him carefully. His eyes have gone all weird -- they’re solid blue, and glow softly in the dark. She hides his face from the view of the cell door, in the event they might be seen.

After a while, he blinks and he’s back.

“I don’t hear the cat,” she whispers.

“He’s coming,” he assures her. And sure enough, the Frumpkin-thing slips between the bars caging them in. (It’s unfair, really, the ease with which it can just Do That.) Like a cat bringing in a dead creature, the Frumpkin-thing has in its mouth a tiny copper wire and drops it at Caleb Widogast’s feet.

“_ Danke _,” he addresses the Frumpkin-thing in that weird human language again. The Frumpkin-thing purrs. He glances at her. “Good?”

She picks it up, nods. Carefully, she watches the guard, and when he doesn’t look, she gingerly fits the wire into the lock on their door. She fiddles with it as quietly as possible, and as soon as she hears the soft _ click _ of it being unlocked, she scuttles as far back into the cell as possible. The guard doesn’t notice her at all.

She exhales a breath she hadn’t noticed she was holding. She catches Caleb Widogast’s eye, gives him an affirmative nod. He returns it.

And then they wait.

The guard stands up and walks away. This is his cue: Caleb Widogast urges her behind him, and lights up their cell with flames.

It’s so hot, and it’s so close. The smoke starts to fill the air, trying to smother and choke the life from her, and in defiance, she screams. She calls for help, begs the guards to rescue her. He joins in too, loud begging, but it’s to no avail. The fire grows larger and they have been left alone to die here.

They make eye contact. He looks -- not scared, but lost. His plan didn’t work the way he wanted it to, and now he doesn’t know what to do. They are trapped in a jail cell and he has put a bonfire between them and their only exit. So she does what she does best, and makes a reckless decision. She grabs his hand and runs through the fire to the unlocked door.

He yells in alarm, wordless noise of distress. She smells burning hair and burning cloth and feels burning skin but they are _ out _and she runs. She barely notices if he is following her as she heads toward the area of storage.

She rifles through boxes and boxes of personal effects until she finds what looks familiar (her rough old gray cloak and a few pouches of trinkets). She feels a knot unwind in her chest, one source of tension relaxing just enough. She glances up; he is gathering a bunch of scraps that seem useless but she is sure have some significance to him (after all, who is she to judge?). He also slings a pair of books under his arms.

“Let’s go,” she tells him, and he nods, and they run as fast as they possibly can out of the building and out of the shitty, shitty little town they’ve been trapped in and they don’t stop running until they collapse in the woods hours later and they sleep.

* * *

In the morning, she wakes up, and he is still there, asleep, twenty feet away.

The Frumpkin-thing is there too, holding a dead mouse in its mouth. It drops the thing at her feet.

“Thanks,” she tells the Frumpkin-thing. It doesn’t respond and heads over to him, curling up beside his face on the ground.

She used to cook food a lot, and while she wasn’t the best, she wasn’t bad at it. Recently, though, she’s found it much easier to just… eat meat raw. Smoke from a cooking fire can attract attention, sure, but it’s something else in the back of her brain that put the thought into her head. _ Skip the preparation. Just eat. You’re hungry. _ So she did, and so now she eats the mouse whole.

It’s not bad. A little crunchy, all those small bones; she probably wouldn’t have been able to cook it at its size. Better than the prison food, anyway.

He stirs awake. His head rises from his loose fetal position curled on his side. He looks confused to see her there.

“Oh,” he mumbles. “Hello.”

She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. “Hi.”

“You’re still here.”

“So are you.”

They stare at each other for a moment. She doesn’t know what he’s looking for. He doesn’t know what she’s looking for, either.

His stomach grumbles. His ears flush pink _ (the way Yeza’s did) _. She looks away.

“You need to eat,” she informs him. “Do you know what’s safe? In the forest, I mean.”

He looks utterly baffled. “Huh?”

“To eat,” she clarifies. She looks at his face again, and his ears aren’t doing that thing anymore. Good. “Do you know what’s safe to eat in the woods? Because I can show you.”

He looks… awed, almost. That’s weird. Nobody looks at her like that.

“No, I don’t,” he answers finally. “I’ve been… a bit of a beggar and thief for several years, now. Stayed near where people live, usually. I haven’t done much foraging.”

“Then come with me.”

And he says, “Okay.”

* * *

She pulls on one purple sprig of a tall plant, covered in dark berries, each with their own little navels on their ends. “You see this?” she instructs. “These will kill you.”

She points to thin stalks emerging from a small plant, topped with golden-yellow and orange berries. “These are pretty good, we can eat these.” She starts picking them, putting them in her pockets. She offers one to him to taste.

He takes it. Considers. Puts it in his mouth, chews, swallows. “It’s good,” he informs her.

“Remember which ones are dangerous?” she asks him.

“I never forget anything,” he tells her seriously.

She mulls this over. Nods. She is satisfied with this.

They spend the rest of the morning gathering berries; they fill their pockets and then some, eating their fill. They are quiet, but it is comforting, not terrifying. She doesn’t have to speak and neither does he.

He takes her seriously, and he hasn’t run from her. He listens to her, treats her politely. She can’t figure out what he’s thinking. She can’t decipher the looks on his face quite yet, he’s too stoic. She assumed he was going to run as soon as they broke out, but he’s still here, and she’s still here, too. But it’s only been a day, she reminds herself. He’ll be gone in the morning.

By evening, they haven’t traveled very far through the woods, but they aren’t hungry. He makes a small fire with magic, and they are warm, and they curl up on the forest floor twenty feet away from each other and in the morning, he and she are still there.


End file.
